Aweber Vs InfusionSoft: Which One Sucks, Which One Rocks?
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There Is An Author Update To This Post – See Below
Aweber and InfusionSoft are both considered tools for automating your marketing. Aweber classifies itself as more of a straight Autoresponder (versus a gay autoresponder) and InfusionSoft classifies itself as more of a tool for automating all aspects of marketing. I use both on a daily basis, and have so for years. IMHO, they are different tools for different purposes, and both are great depending on where you are at in your business. Lemme break ‘em down for you here:
**Special Note: We currently use both of these systems. We like them both – so much that we are active affiliates for both, and actively promote both. If you buy either of these services from the links below, we get a small commission as the referrer – and if you do purchase, thanks!. Our affiliation doesn’t change my opinion of these services. We’ve used them for years before we decided to affiliate.Aweber – “Emailers Only”
Aweber’s system is the best for automated email followup. Notice I didn’t say “broadcast” followup – just the automated stuff. They have a pristine record with the ISP’s, and they aim to keep it that way. What that means is that marketers who abuse their service (sending out spammy emails, etc) lose their accounts. I like them for automated email followup, but I do NOT recommend them for broadcasting.
They stick to email only – they have no setup for direct mail, voicemail broadcasts, etc. They do not claim to be a CRM tool, and offer none of the features to assist with that. One could make the argument that they should add those tools to their system, but Tom Kulzer (their CEO) seems laster-focused on maximizing their brand in the email marketing vertical. Good on ‘em.
The Good Stuff:
- Inexpensive (account starts at $15 USD / month)
- Easy for newbies (they have tons of free training, and the interface is simple)
- Dummy-proof (they make you comply with CAN-SPAM, which is good for people who don’t have clue what they are doing).
- HIGH Deliverability (if the email doesn’t get delivered, then nothing else matters)
The Not-Good Stuff
- Limited customization (they don’t use triggers, they require double-optins to view one of their pre-written messages or require that they approve any custom messages)
- Limited features (it’s email only – no other marketing features included)
- They will spank you if your spam complaints get too high. This is good and bad – the idiots who spam people to death lose their accounts and therefore allow Aweber to keep deliverability high for everyone else. Problem is that if you have too big a list, you can’t really broadcast at all, as even a small percentage of complaintes comes up as a flag.
- List segmentation is limited. You gotta get a shopping cart if you’re doing sales, and it’s tricky to do very sophisticated list segmentation. For example, even if someone double opts for one list, they gotta go through the same process if they take an action and join another list. It’s fairly redundant.
- Not big-list friendly. If you have a list over 20k subscribers, then you will have some special challenges. List-importing is limited (they must all double opt to Aweber’s system when you import them) and if you make a change to your followup, then EVERYONE gets the change and cycles back through your followup again. There isn’t any feature to make a change and integrate for new list joiners only – everyone gets it. No big deal when you have a list of a few hundred or few thousand people, but it’s not so cool when you want to make a change and it affects 70k subscribers.
Get An Aweber Test-Drive Here
InfusionSoft – “IT Personnel Only”
Infusion was originally promoted by Dan Kennedy as the be-all, end-all of marketing automation. It originally sold for $6k to set up, plus $300/mo for ongoing usage, and nobody knew what the hell to do with it after they got it. Their training sucked, customer support sucked, and it was so damn complicated that marketers could barely send broadcasts without help from the IT department.
They have since upgraded their training, and adjusted their pricepoint to a sane level that actually reflects the value of the service. They also got some customer support reps that knew what the hell was going on, which helped everyone out.
The “brains” behind the system is a tag setup, meaning that once a lead comes in, they are given tags to identify them for specific email followup campaigns, voicemail followup campaigns, or direct-mail followup campaigns. Once you figure it out, it’s actually pretty cool – it offers much greater flexibility with your marketing in list segmentation, and you can make your segments much more action-oriented.
The Good Stuff
- Infusion is much more than email automation. You can run affiliate programs, monitor and track leadflow through sophisticated funnels, integrate custom shopping cart solutions (or use theirs), run continuity programs, drop voicemails/direct mail, and manage fulfillment reports all from one interface. It’s nice
- Much more sophisticated list segmentation. By using triggers, you can be very, very specific with your followup marketing campaigns. You can ensure that people who click a link get a separate followup series from those who do not, those who open a specific email can be separated from those who don’t, etc.
- Easy list importing and double optins. You have much great freedom to customize your double-optin emails and links, and they allow the importing of previous lists (hot damn!)
- Much easier on Spam complaints. They do not take the “marketer is assumed guilty” approach to broadcasts. Really, this is good and bad (I’ll explain in a minute)
- Pricepoint is currently MUCH more reasonable. It’s running $199 to start, then scales up depending on how much email volume you’re pushing. When you factor in the other stuff it does, it’s pretty cost-effective.
The Not-Good Stuff
- Not for newbies. It’s not an easy system to learn (even now). You don’t need an IT staff anymore, but you will need some time to get how the system works. In order to make use of the additional customization features, you (or someone you know) will need to have some technical competency (comfortable working with html, API’s, etc). Nothing too fancy, but it’s not “plug and play” like Aweber.
- Questionable deliverability. Their domain has been greylisted. That’s not good. I still don’t understand how they track spam. They approached me several months ago saying our spam rates were way too high. I looked in the system, and saw them chillin’ at 1.2% (1.2 people out of 100 were hitting the spam button when we mailed). They said we were at 5% (which is crazy-high). We said that the back office didn’t reflect those numbers – they said “tough – sort it, or we are shutting your account down”. So we broke up for a little while (we have since been happily reunited).
- Good old-fashioned “dumb” in the system. Now, this is coming from a current InfusionSoft user. I love many aspects of their system, and am currently spending several hundreds of dollars every month for it’s usage (and I happily pay it – saves us a bunch of time and money). But there are some things that we have found that just don’t make a damn bit of sense with their setup.
For example – we needed to change merchant accounts for some of our continuity subscribers. They had no feature to do this en masse - we had to manually go through hundreds of records one-by-one and update each to run through the new merchant account.
‘Nuther example - when you unsubscribe from an InfusionSoft email, they ask the person unsubscribing if they would like to flag the message as spam. Yes, they actually present a “yes or no” push-button option to mark email as spam if a subscriber wants to unsubscribe. That may have something to do with their greylisting issue…
‘Nuther example - they accidentally charged a bunch of our clients an unsolicited charge on their credit cards. Yeah, I know – DUMB. We refunded everyone, apologized to all of them because it lokos like we did the charge when IS was the culprit.
Good news is that they have gotten progressively less-dumb as they have developed as a company, and they are the first to make apologies when need be. But they have had to apologize a lot.
>>>Author UPDATE (See Below)<<<
**NOT RECOMMENDED**
Listen, it takes a real stinker to get on my “not recommended list”. But here are a couple that we simply don’t recommend under ANY circumstance:
Lyris is a huge company chock-full of non-marketing morons. Seriously, they don’t get it. Their system is near-impossible to use, takes FOREVER to set up, and has terrible deliverability. They do offer triggers, but they don’t work most of the time. On top of all of it, they charge several thousand to get set up, and several hundred to several thousand per month. Their customer service is lame, and they try to lock people into long-term contracts.
We simply don’t recommend them unless you are looking for a tax write off (without any emotional gratification).
“Free” Autoresponders
In the autoresponder world, the axiom “you get what you pay for” isn’t always true. Sometimes, you get way more for less money. But every free autoresponder software that we have used wasn’t even worth the time it took to download. If you’re going to be mailing, you gotta pony up and treat it like a real business. It doesn’t mean you need to get the most expensive solution out there, but you want to be paying for something if you’re going to be mailing on a consistent basis.
I know there are exceptions for everything, and we may get a thousand hate mails talking about how their free service rocks. If you find a great freebie, good on ya. In our experience, shelling out $15/mo for everything you get with Aweber is more than worth it.
>>AUTHOR UPDATE<<<
Alright, we are officially revising this update. Infusionsoft is just awful. This week, they did some sort of crappy update to their email builder that forces you to customize your emails to the point that it takes much, much longer to hit send now. They added this feature in the name of helping me to double my sales. As if they would know better than I how to double my sales. Now we have to take twice as long just to broadcast an email to our database. Twice as long means I can only send half as many broadcasts. That’s HALVING my sales, not doubling them.
Then, we find out that it’s messing up the emails that we send on behalf of our Affiliates for followup positioning (our goal is to help our Aff’s make followup sales to our Intro-product clients). Turns out that the variables they should be forwarding are invisible – no affiliate contact info at all.
Finally, we discover that some of our emails aren’t even going out at all. As in – someone purchases a product, and they don’t get the intended followup emails to access the product.
I’m just done with InfusionSoft. DONE.
I can no longer in good conscience endorse InfusionSoft. We are in the process of moving all of our marketing over to Office AutoPilot. They integrate in with Ultracart, and together, provide a solution that we believe is easier to use and much more powerful than Infusion.
We will use InfusionSoft as a CRM only – just because we have a bunch of client payment plans tied up in their system, and it would be easier to just let them run their course than try to extract them all. Over the years, I estimate we’ve paid in about $17,000+ for Infusion. They have disappointed time, and time, and time again. Yes, they do have some good features. Yes, they do some things that Aweber does not. But Office AutoPilot does more than Infusion, and (in our humble opinions) it’s a million times easier to use, they have an actual SATISFACTION GUARANTEE backing them up, their email deliverability is better, and they are less expensive.
And frankly, at this point, the disappointment factor is just too high. It has officially become more painful to stay than to move.
We’ll keep you posted, but at this point, we suggest Aweber for newbies and email-only automation, Office AutoPilot if you need to automate other aspects of your business or use offline marketing.
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quadjohn
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April 16, 2010, 11:46 pm
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TopThis is a fantastic compare and contrast of services. Since I’m new to this industry, I’m currently looking at different programs to use, and this is the most simple and straightforward explanation I’ve found. I think I’ll be going with Aweber for the fact that I am new to this. I need something that will be dummy proof. Perhaps later I will look into InfusionSoft.
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Rashmi
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April 17, 2010, 11:13 pm
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TopI am so glad I read your post. I am not a tech savvy and I am quite new in the marketing field. A lot of people suggest a lot of things. However, now I know its preferable I go with Aweber as I am just starting up. Probably some years down the line I will think about shifting to Infusion Soft.
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admin
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April 20, 2010, 6:49 am
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Top@Quadjohn – thanks. If you’re new to the industry, I think you’re making a good choice with Aweber. One thing to keep in mind – when you get set up, you need to know if you want to use double optin or single optin for your lists, and that you need to set that before you start generating leads. You can do so under “list settings”.
You can read about the differences here:
http://www.aweber.com/faq/categories/Customers/Subscribers/Confirmed+Opt-In/
@Rashmi – ditto
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NancyC
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April 22, 2010, 12:15 am
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TopThanks for taking the time to post this info. I’m pretty new to auto-responders (and I have a small list!), so based on you recommendations, I’ll try Awebe.
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liya
5
May 2, 2010, 4:03 am
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TopI’m quite thankful to you. I was in doubt and really confused as am new to this marketting field. After reading your post, am sure that am a Awebe
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Ajay Devan
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May 16, 2010, 11:02 pm
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TopInfusion originally sold for $6k to seup. Plus $300/mo for ongoing usage, and nobody knew what the hell to do with it after they got it.
But Aweber is a good stuff and easy for newbies. Good Article Admin we are expecting more article like this.
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admin
7
May 17, 2010, 6:03 am
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Top@Liya – Good call.
@Ajay – Yup – and we friggin’ paid that $6k /$300 per month license fee. Back in the olden days, Infusionsoft also required that you pay for “consulting” – which was basically extortion (pay $100/hr to learn how to use your $6k system).
They have come a long way, and we like them a lot better now. But we still recommend Aweber for newbies.
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Ras
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May 17, 2010, 6:19 am
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TopThanks for this very detailed but easy to understand look at both of these systems, I’ve read about Aweber over at EricaBiz’s blog and know that she’s used it to great success. But it’s equally important to know what else is out that, and the pitfalls. Most importantly thanks for pointing out the real stinkers. I think it’s most important to know what to give a wide berth. So many bombs exist out there, it’s good to know which ones to avoid.
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Jack
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May 30, 2010, 8:46 am
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TopI’m trying to help my brother-in-law customize some templates he’s received, and I needed to have information about an autoresponder so that he’ll be building his OWN list, not just adding to his upstream affiliate’s list.
Your advise about Aweber is very helpful in that regard. Can you tell me whether the Aweber license allows you to place their code on more than one website (I’ve read that you can set up multiple email addresses, but I want to know whether it’s allowed to use the same account on multple websites).
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admin
10
June 2, 2010, 9:52 am
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TopHi Jack,
Yes, you can place the code on an unlimited number of websites (at least I think it’s unlimited – we have it on several hundred sites and haven’t had any issues yet).
You can also create multiple lists, so that you have code for different lists on different sites as well.
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Brian
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July 23, 2010, 12:49 pm
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TopGreat breakdown. I’m currently using IS and the expense is starting to wear on me… My partner and I are considering a switch to AW, but now I am starting to think that it will be a pain to switch, not to mention the fact that we will probably need to switch back down the road for the additional features.
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admin
12
August 12, 2010, 7:20 am
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Top@Brian – I just heard about Office Autopilot – seems that if you couple a good shopping cart with their service, you have just about as much function as InfusionSoft. We haven’t tested it yet, but it sounds interesting.
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JP from HowToWebinar
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October 27, 2010, 8:18 pm
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TopWe use Office AutoPilot – like the functionality so far, but we’re about to integrate a payment system.
Any suggestions about which integrates the best?
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admin
14
October 28, 2010, 12:15 pm
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TopOAP rolls with Ultracart for a shopping cart right now, but word on the street is they will have they own shopping cart ready before too long. UC is pretty slick – we’ve been happy with ‘em, but we’re excited to see what OAP has up their sleeves.
For actual payment processing, it kinda depends on what market you’re in. Our best experience has been with Powerpay. Litle is good if you have a physical product. USMS is also quality. Currently, we process the bulk of our stuff with Powerpay, and they deliver.
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Will
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February 14, 2011, 8:29 pm
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TopI am very new to all for this and a friend of mine has been showing me the back end of his Infusionsoft and I can’t help but to drool every time I see everything IS can do. I will def use Infusionsoft. Thanks!
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admin
16
February 15, 2011, 3:18 pm
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TopGood luck bro
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Mike Citron
17
February 24, 2011, 11:20 am
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TopI’ve been an infusionsoft user for about 5 years now, I was a legacy client who paid nearly 10K for the program.
I truly believe that the concept/vision of the company is GREAT but the execution is far less than acceptable.
I am in a similar business, so I understand the complexities with developing software and customer service.
Over the years I’ve dealt with the inadeqacies that were related to infusionsoft BUT now I’m completely at my breaking point and realize infusionsoft is NOT the end all solution and it probably is a better idea to have multiple solutions that interact than have an “all-in-one” that doesn’t work.
We all know email deliverability is not consistent with Infusion, although it has improved – it’s certainly not even in the same hemisphere as aweber or constant contact.
Now.. what’s thrown me over the edge- Infusionsoft reporting DOESN’T WORK! My team has spent HOURS with support trying to figure out why the reporting #’s aren’t congruent. Recently there was an update made to the projected revenue report, and it doesn’t include a substantial amount of data. The old report was way too high in estimations, now the new report barely counts anything…
BUT.. that’s not what’s forced me to write this.. we’re getting ready for a boutique event tomorrow and we’ve been going through our list of attendees to ensure everyone is paid (daunting task for my team.. but had to be done).. Ops manager was puzzled why an individual who is setup on autobill wasn’t billed (not the first time a massive problem like this has happened with billing)… So back to Infusion customer service… who after having to go back and forth for assistance 8 times finally came up with the problem…
Our system was setup to stop autobilling on clients whose outstanding invoice is not paid for “ONE MONTH” (how it was labeled in the system). So if a payment has not been made in a month then the invoice would automatically be marked as inactive and would NOT autobill… The problem is ONE MONTH to infusionsoft = 30 DAYS.. What happens in a 31 day month you ask????
Well… What happens is all outstanding invoices in a 31 day month get marked inactive and no autobilling takes place…
Tech Support was kind enough to email us an excel sheet of all invoices that were effected by this.. good thing it was only 84 invoices totaling 38491.37
… YEP $38K…
Now.. if they had any type of substantive reporting we could have caught this months ago…
I will say a positive thing along with the negatives… although I will never refer another one of my members to infusionsoft – I do believe it’s their intention to do things right BUT they are stuck with poor execution on the details..
I’ll likely have to stay with them for a while as we create a system to manage the issues we have BUT I am severely disappointed…
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admin
18
February 24, 2011, 11:35 am
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Top@Mike,
I feel your pain. While I agree that IS does indeed mean well, results are the bottom line. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”…
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Mike Citron
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February 25, 2011, 12:02 pm
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TopThe above comment by me, was the first time that I’ve ever written a blog post about a company – positive or negative (that I can remember).
What I can say is this- Infusionsoft responded rapidly to an email that I sent- they quickly are working to resolve the issues. I am satisfied at the response I received form infusionsoft, and agree that the issue that pushed me over the edge was a shared liability.
Both Infusionsoft and I could have prevented this, so I cannot pin the “blame” directly on them 100%.
I look forward to new updates and enhancements that I’ve been notified of. I truly believe in any company that responds to adversity as well they did.
If you’re thinking about using Infusionsoft, don’t let my opinions change your thoughts, we have a unique business with unique needs that always align with everyone else s.
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Keenan
20
March 1, 2011, 1:18 pm
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TopWhat’s been the progress with your move to OAP? We’re in the middle of selecting a solution and I’ve been leaning on OAP.
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admin
21
March 1, 2011, 1:46 pm
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Top@Keenan,
The only issue we have had with OAP is their affiliate program – if you run a biz that’s affiliate-heavy, then it will take some extra time working with their reps to get things sorted out.
Everything else has been a huge improvement – lead segregation, followup logics, open rates on emails – it’s all improved significantly.
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Keenan
22
March 1, 2011, 5:41 pm
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TopThanks for the update. Honestly this is one of the most helpful discussions I’ve ever come across.
Since there’s not a true shopping cart element, are you using the SmartForms and Payment Processing system? If so, what are your thoughts?
Is a shopping cart still needed or does OAP now do the job for most applications?
Lastly, why not just use 1ShoppingCart or similar service?
In your experience are the additional features really worth it?
What would you recommend for a very small business or info/internet marketer without much revenue, internal technical support or time to set up/run?
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Kwin
23
March 30, 2011, 6:23 pm
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TopSeriously, This post just made my day! I’m with Aweber (long time) and been thinking of switching to IS. SO glad I found this, because I found out about OAP!
Thank you! I think you just saved me a lot of headache!
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Welly Mulia
24
April 25, 2011, 11:13 pm
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TopHi
What’s your experience with Office Autopilot email deliverability? Are they as good as aweber?
Thanks for your time,
Welly Mulia
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Rajen
25
May 1, 2011, 4:19 am
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TopHow about Get Response ? Anyone tried them ? How are they compared to Aweber ?
Cheers,
R
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admin
26
May 2, 2011, 1:49 pm
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Top@Welly,
Great question – stat-wise, CTR dropped way down…but then sales went up, and traffic went up. All I can conclude is that Aweber’s tracking is way, way off (open rates went from 25% down to 5%…but traffic increased. Weird.)
@Rajen – GetResponse sounds good. I haven’t personally used them, so I can’t speak to how good, but peeps that I’ve spoken with have loved ‘em.
@Keenan,
Great questions man. To go with your last question first – IM’er without much capital, I’d roll Aweber or Sendpepper with 1ShoppingCart. This shows you how to do it:
http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/237/How+Do+I+Integrate+1ShoppingCart+With+AWeber%3F
To Answer your other questions – we customize our order forms in-house, or we integrate UltraCart if we don’t need it tricked out.
But again, for your situation, I’d just use Aweber + 1SC
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Another dissatisfied customer
27
June 2, 2011, 4:43 pm
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TopWell, I used Infusion”SUCKS” for about 2yrs before I finally gave up. Over that period of time I went to numerous trainings both in person and online. The bottom line was that no matter what steps I took to get people to open my emails, they never did and from my customer service calls found out they were usually in the junk folder. I don’t know the reasons because the support team always had pat answers that never seemed to make sense to me. My last effort to make the system work failed miserably I sent out another batch of over 200 emails both single and double opt in and only had a handful opened. However, I did receive a number of automated SPAM complaints. The last straw was when I went to clean out my junk email folder and saw the copy that get’s sent to the sender. I had made sure that I double opted in even after all the work spent to minimize this result for my clients, Infusionsoft couldn’t even make it to my in box.
While they talk a good game, I wouldn’t recommend this product to anyone. There are just too many other providers out there that can actually deliver. Unfortunately I learned the hard way at a very significant cost but, you don’t.
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Mike
28
July 17, 2011, 9:41 pm
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TopIs Office AutoPilot missing any features InfusionSoft provides (CRM???)?
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Kerrie Belancer
29
September 17, 2011, 1:59 am
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TopAs I site possessor I believe the content matter here is rattling fantastic appreciate it for your efforts You should keep it up forever Good Luck
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Burke Franklin
30
January 5, 2012, 1:51 pm
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TopI just started using Infusionsoft in Dec 2011 — cam highly recommended, etc., they now demand $2000 upfront for set-up/education consulting… Seems pretty good so far, but I haven’t uploaded my emails (50K+) or sent anything out. Since you have been using both IS as well as as OAP for a while now, what is your verdict? (I’m moving back to Santa Barbara where OAP is just down the street!) Also, I love your 2011 blog — I created BizPlanBuilder business planning software so I can relate to your trials and tribulations getting going! I’m working on a new project now (www.marriage2-0.com) and am growing my concern over IS if it is going to screw-up what I’m launching… All ideas very much appreciated. (Any Jian software is yours for the asking in gratitude for your comments!)